You would think that listing all the factors that Google uses to determine your ranking would be a near impossible task, right? Well, apparently not. Today we have your first sneak peek at the list of the almost 200 search engine ranking factors used by Google.

How did this list get started? Well, apparently Mr Google, Matt Cutts, mentioned at PubCon recently that there are over 200 variables in the Google algorithm. So the folks at the WebmasterWorld set themselves a challenge to list them all.

Here is what has been included so far:

Domain

Age of domain

History of domain

Keywords in domain name

IP address of domain

Location of IP address / Server

Architecture

HTML structure

Use of Headers tags

URL path

Use of external CSS / JavaScript files

Content

Keyword density of page

Keywords in Title Tag

Keywords in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)

Keywords in header tags (H1, H2 etc)

Keywords in body text

Freshness of content

Per Inbound Link

Quality of website inbound linking

Quality of web page inbound linking

Age of website

Age of web page

Relevancy of page's content

Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text)

Anchor text of link

Title attribute of link

ALT tag of images linking

Country specific top level domain

Authority of top level domain (.edu, .gov)

Location of server

Authority links (CNN, BBC, etc)

Cluster of Links

Uniqueness of class C IP address

Internal Cross Linking

Number of internal links to page

Location of link on page

Anchor text of FIRST text link

Penalties

Over optimisation

Purchasing links

Selling links

Comment spamming

Cloaking

Hidden text

Duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

Manual penalties

Miscellaneous

JavaScript links

No follow links

Pending

Performance / Load of a website

Speed of Javascript

Misconceptions

XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn't help rankings)

PageRank (General indicator of page's performance)

(Thanks to irlbonalb at Webmaster World for getting the list started).

So, if you're new to SEO this is a great checklist to get you started. What factors have been missed? Feel free to add to the list in our comments section below.

Hi Cheryl -- Wow, lots of stuff to consider here. I wonder what constitutes "duplicate content." I'm going to check into that one a bit I think. I used to live in Waldorf a long time ago! :) -- not totally close by to you, but in the same neck of the woods!